Heather Villa

When you’re putting together a project there will come a time when you need to file a report. But how do you do it… and how do you do it well? I’m reminded of a story once where I worked on a project (as an employee who participated, not as the project manager). The project [...]

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“Can I have a show of hands?” is a project killer. There, I said it. If you’ve said this, you can be forgiven for saying it because few people realize just how poisonous it is to a project. Part of the reason is that most of us have grown up in a democratic society (whether [...]

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Perfectionism sounds like a great ideal to strive for in business and in project management but it is a mirage – a hazy image on the horizon that will never be achieved. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a large business, a small business, a start-up, a department, or a project that is being [...]

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In medium-to-large organizations, middle managers have a real project management challenge: They need to run their part of the organization efficiently and implement programs and projects to do their job effectively. And, in order to do that, they need to get buy-in from levels above them (for sponsorship and project funding) and levels below them [...]

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This is a true story, although the details have been changed to protect the guilty parties. I was hired as an outside consultant to manage a project for an international corporation. They were producing a new project – a multi-million dollar project that was supposed to go to market within a specific timeframe. On the [...]

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This is a message for all business owners, entrepreneurs, project managers… and basically anyone else out there who has a big task to accomplish. I know you have it tough. Projects are big and unwieldy. It’s hard to start. It’s hard to gain momentum. It’s hard to maintain momentum. It’s hard to juggle everything and [...]

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Remember in high school math class when the teacher would write an equation on the board and then tell us to “solve for X”? To solve for X students would have to work out the entire equation with X to the side and then get to the point where it became obvious. Example: 2X+6 = [...]

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